What distinguishes high schools that "beat the odds" for students from traditionally lower-performing groups from schools that struggle to improve the achievement and graduation rates of these student populations? What types of programs, practices, and processes support better than expected outcomes for students at risk of failure? How can districts identify, adapt, and scale up these practices to their less effective high schools? These are the questions that the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools (NCSU) is addressing. NCSU--a collaborative partnership between research universities, developers, and two large urban districts--is a five-year project funded by the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education. NCSU focuses on identifying the combination of essential components and the programs, practices, processes, and policies that explain why some high schools in large urban districts are particularly effective at serving low-income students, minority students, and English language learners. NCSU then works collaboratively with the districts to develop processes to share and implement these practices in less effective high schools. This report presents findings from the first phase of this work--the identification of practices that distinguish higher and lower value-added high schools in one of NCSU's partner districts, the Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD). The findings from this report will be used to define a "design challenge" that will guide a collaborative design process that will develop an innovation to be implemented in the district. Through analyses, the practice of increasing student ownership and responsibility for their academic success emerged as a distinguishing feature of schools with higher value-added student achievement over those with lower value-added achievement. The following are appended: (1) Data and Methods; (2) Quality of Classroom Instruction Report; (3) Fort Worth Student Shadowing Report; (4) Student Survey Data; (5) Teacher Survey Data; and (6) District Perspectives on High School Effectiveness. [For the technical report, "Measuring School Effectiveness: Technical Report on the 2011 Value-Added Model. Technical Report," see ED561265.]

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